Calling for the city to solve the Chicago Public Schools' "cleanliness crisis," Maria Moreno, in mask, financial secretary at the Chicago Teachers Union, David Robbins, right in yellow suit, and CTU members and supporters walk to Kenwood Academy High School on April 13, 2018.

Calling for the city to solve the Chicago Public Schools' "cleanliness crisis," Maria Moreno, in mask, financial secretary at the Chicago Teachers Union, David Robbins, right in yellow suit, and CTU members and supporters walk to Kenwood Academy High School on April 13, 2018. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

Taking on long-standing complaints about school cleanliness, Chicago Public Schools plans to conduct monthly inspections of buildings as part of a process that could result in sanctions against companies that were recently awarded renewals on multimillion-dollar maintenance contracts.

CPS said it conducted 125 comprehensive “blitz” inspections at schools to assess their conditions. Ninety-one of those schools failed initial inspections, officials said, falling short on a variety of categories including food storage and pest control.

“It is demoralizing and unfair to ask people to go into these schools and to work in those kind of conditions,” CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey said Wednesday.

“Are our schools going to have toilet paper and soap?” Sharkey later asked the Chicago Board of Education. “Let’s keep it real, there’s some very basic things that we’re going to need in terms of cleaning schools and that’s how we’re going to judge the progress on that.”

CPS has committed to hiring 200 additional custodians to clean schools over the coming summer break, and keep at least 100 of them on hand for the 2018-19 school year.

Officials told the board that CPS would also appoint a quality control team to audit school conditions, create corrective plans for vendors and report on how an expanding facilities management plan is progressing.

“The key word here is accountability, and that’s accountability from the top to the bottom,” CPS CEO Janice Jackson told the school board.

“There are no sacred cows, so we will continue to report until it’s up to a satisfactory level. But what I won’t do is make a comment about one thing being better than the other, because we just quite frankly we don’t enough evidence to support that,” she said.

CPS cited its bleak financial condition in 2014 when it privatized many school maintenance duties. But complaints about dirty schools piled up ever since custodial contract management contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars were first awarded to two firms, SodexoMAGIC and a division of the Aramark company.

Those companies have so far been paid a combined $356.5 million for building maintenance since the district’s 2014 fiscal year, according to CPS purchasing records. SodexoMAGIC is partly controlled by former NBA superstar Earvin "Magic" Johnson, a financial supporter of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The school board renewed contracts this year for both companies, and the firms will be responsible for taking over all school custodial and engineering services — plus tasks including snow removal, landscaping and pest control.

“While we feel it’s a stronger model, we’re also not naive to the fact that it’s going to be yet another transition for school principals,” district Chief Operating Officer Arnaldo Rivera said. “It’s a better model, like I said, it’s not a silver bullet.”